When a Personal Trainer Gets Too Personal

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE

Published: April 14, 2005

CORRECTION APPENDED

WHEN Shibani Joshi walked into a Manhattan branch of the New York Sports Club last summer, all she wanted was a more toned body and a distraction from the job-hunting that occupied her days. So when a trainer told her she needed to adjust her barbell routine and offered free sessions until she found work, she thought she was getting a deal.

''I thought that he was just going to help me correct my technique and maybe teach me something new,'' said Ms. Joshi, 29, who works in television broadcasting.

But at the second session, while Ms. Joshi was mid-squat, the trainer asked where she liked to go out weekends and who she lived with. (''My boyfriend,'' she replied.) Not long after, he got her home phone number and began to leave messages. During the third session he invited her out to a nightclub. She declined and canceled the next appointment. ''I couldn't go through an hour of constant bombardment for a date in return for free weight-training sessions,'' she said. Too embarrassed to complain, she canceled her membership and joined a gym farther away.

Few professional relationships throw people into such physical intimacy as one-on-one gym training; and few are as fraught with the peril of crossing business and pleasure. Thanks in part to the rapid growth of the industry -- including health club chains that offer individual training, classes and freelancers who make house calls -- the opportunities for personal trainers to get too personal are greater than in the past. In 2003, 5.3 million Americans used a trainer, an increase of 32 percent over five years. The rules and safeguards against improper conduct vary. Some gyms, like those run by Equinox, have strict codes of conduct forbidding ''discussions of sexual, ethnic or religious issues'' and other unprofessional behavior. Others, including the New York Sports Club branches, do not.

''There's no formal rule concerning conduct between a client and a personal trainer, but if something inappropriate is taking place, we will handle it and they will be disciplined appropriately,'' said Susan Gerson, the director of public relations for Town Sports International, which operates the chain. She said the company is formulating such a policy and has instituted measures to allow people to send anonymous complaints to the chain's corporate office.

But although official rules -- and common sense -- can provide a rough guide, those in the field say every trainer-client relationship is terrain that must be negotiated afresh.

''It's a very personal thing,'' said Colleen O'Brien, a personal trainer and martial arts expert who has worked in New York for 13 years (though she has yet to use her kickboxing skills to ward off an overly enthusiastic client). ''When you show up, and you don't click, the relationship isn't going to work.''

That can go for both the trainers, who may find themselves the target of unwanted advances or the recipient of too much information about a client's love life, and for the trainees, who may find that a guiding hand is a little lower than it needs to be.

''It's like being a psychotherapist, you get close to people,'' said Jim Windis, a trainer who works at clients' homes. ''Some people don't know how to deal with that. Boundaries start to break down, and a lot of inappropriate stuff goes on. I used to know a trainer who freebased cocaine with some of his radio personality and Broadway clients in the early 1980's.''

Mr. Windis said that when he got his start working at the Sports Training Institute -- widely regarded as New York's first personal-training gym -- during the 1970's, ''There were no rules,'' he said. ''Everyone was flying by the seat of their pants.''

Nowadays most reputable gyms require trainers to complete an in-house training course or get certification from an outside organization, which often have guidelines regarding professionalism. But the rapid growth of gyms has been accompanied by an equally rapid profusion of accrediting agencies, some of which perform rigorous testing on would-be trainers and some of which amount to little more than certificate mills.

''Right now there is no standard, so certifiers do whatever they want,'' said Ron J. Clark, the president of the National Federation of Professional Trainers, an agency in Lafayette, Ind., that has 12,000 members. (Idea Health and Fitness Association, an organization for fitness professionals, estimates that there are 75,000 personal trainers in the United States.) The Federation's guidelines state that ''complaints regarding lewd and immoral conduct, disrespectfulness, unprofessional behavior and conduct, inappropriate sexual advances, excessive profane language'' are all potential grounds for decertification. But not every agency is so fastidious.

Then again, not all close relationships between trainers and clients are lopsided. Sometimes the intensity and long hours breed genuine friendships, as they did for Jody Johannessen, a marketing professional who works out at La Palestra, an exclusive Manhattan gym, with two trainers, one of whom is Marissa O'Neil. ''Putting my health and improvement of my health in her hands, for me that was a huge thing,'' said Ms. Johannessen, who wanted help rehabilitating her injured back.

After more than a year together Ms. Johannessen invited Ms. O'Neil to her birthday party. She even helped Ms. O'Neil get an apartment in her building. But even for conscientious trainers, working in close proximity to sweaty, shapely people in skimpy clothes can make it hard to know where to draw the line.

''Over the years there have been opportunities, but I have never even given the vibe off that I was interested,'' said Gerry Healy, who runs a personal-training business in Boston. ''It's not wise to dip your pen in company ink.'' Most clients come from referrals, he said, and one angry person ''can be the kiss of death.''

Not all the boundary-breaking is sexual. When a trainer asked Bree Nixon, a consultant for Glamour magazine, if she lived with her boyfriend, she steeled herself for a come-on. Then, she recalled, ''He said something about how he really believed in moral fortitude. I was asking how to get more strength in my body, and he said, 'God gives me the strength in my body.''' Later she saw the trainer slip a small book -- the New Testament, it turned out -- into her gym bag. Ms. Nixon complained to the club manager who, by way of apology, told her that the trainer ''recently became born again, and he's a little overenthusiastic.''

Weight rooms can be bewildering or intimidating domains, and trainers are their masters. Clients' inexperience can give unscrupulous trainers emotional leverage over them. Hilary Semel, a 33-year-old lawyer in Manhattan, said she joined a Crunch gym to rehabilitate her knee. The trainer she hired made overt sexual comments almost from the beginning.

''I'm friendly, and I'm also not very uptight,'' Ms. Semel recalled. But soon he began commenting on the shapeliness of her legs and telling her that he wanted to ''tap'' her rear end. She says she blew it off and remained friendly -- they did a session at the gym in his apartment building, and she got his name on the entry list at a nightclub where her friend worked -- until he began asking when they were going to hook up.

''I should have articulated more clearly what the boundaries were and fired him when he didn't respect them,'' she said. ''I felt like I was in some sick relationship. Like I had to break up with him.'' (A spokeswoman for Crunch, Shetal Amin, said it has ''a pretty extensive antiharassment policy,'' adding that the trainer in question had been dismissed, in part because of improprieties.)

Eventually Ms. Semel found another trainer, female and very professional, at the same gym.

''For several months, he was the bane of my existence,'' she said. ''It was so frustrating because I was paying for it.''

Ground Rules: Staying Out of Trouble at the Gym

FITNESS industry experts advise people looking for a personal trainer to take these steps to make sure their relationship remains above board.

1. Test-drive your trainer. Training is physical, and a trainer will need to correct a client's posture or movement by touching. It is important to work with someone you are comfortable with. Have more than one appointment before signing a contract.

2. Ask for credentials. Make sure a trainer is certified by a reputable organization, ideally one accredited by the National Commission for Certifying Agencies or another third party. The National Strength and Conditioning Association and the American Council on Exercise, both accredited, are considered the leading groups for trainer certification. Other groups, like the National Federation of Professional Trainers, the American College of Sports Medicine, the National Academy of Sports Medicine, the National Council on Strength and Fitness and the International Fitness Professionals Association are pursuing accreditation. Call the agency to confirm certification.

3. Get it in writing. ''It is incumbent for the trainer to lay out word by word, point for point, what the relationship is going to be about, even to the extent of profanity and personal appearance,'' said Ron J. Clark, president of the National Federation of Professional Trainers. Clients should ask whether the trainers' gym or certification agency has a code of conduct, so a client can discern and report any unacceptable behavior.

4. Have an escape clause. Make sure your contract allows you to cancel if the trainer violates your arrangement or makes you uncomfortable. NICHOLAS CONFESSORE

Photos: WORKING OUT -- Hilary Semel said a trainer from Crunch made sexual comments; he was fired, the gym said. (Photo by Diane Bondareff for The New York Times)

Correction: April 28, 2005, Thursday
An article on April 14 about personal trainers misspelled the surname of the trainer who said, ''A lot of inappropriate stuff goes on.'' He is Jim Windus, not Windis.